Travel has become for me an occasion to buy The Spectator, for it entertains in a way American magazines don’t (or, perhaps because of political correctness, can’t) and it costs a whopping $7.20. Bob’s News was out of copies when I left for Seattle, but I was saved on that long, trans-continental flight by an interesting seatmate who had been a professor of Russian literature.
In Portland I found the April 21st issue, which I read on the flight home from Philadelphia. It contained a review of The End of the French Intellectual, in which I learned the word declinologie, and this sentence from Stephen Bayley’s review of The Space Barons: “It’s estimated that the last launch of Elon Musk’s Space-X resulted in a 560-mile-wide hole torn in the ionosphere, compromising local GPS signals and exposing us to deadly death rays from outer space – and further exposure to Elon’s lethal grin.”
Charles Moore, in “The Spectator’s Notes,” recalled Barbara Bush’s visit to 10 Downing Street as First Lady. On her arrival, Denis Thatcher kissed her hand. On her departure, she kissed his.
At lunch the other day, a friend I hadn’t seen in a while told me about the books she’d been reading and the movies she’d seen, and then she started talking about podcasts. Podcasts, I noted to myself, came along just as I was trying to get used to dozens of channels of high-quality television.
“There’s so much good stuff out there now,” my friend said, “that’s it’s impossible to keep track of it all.”
We are living in a golden age in which the sheer quantity of quality makes it increasingly hard to be heard.
The other Saturday I heard Luis Alberto Urrea talking about his new book with Scott Simon on “Weekend Edition.” I had not heard him since attending a wonderfully entertaining talk he gave at the San Miguel Writers' Conference in 2015. Then last week I heard him interviewed by Terry Gross on “Fresh Air.”
Saturday I picked up last Sunday’s New York Times Sunday Review and read an essay by Luis Alberto Urrea on Trump’s proposed wall. Yesterday, reading the Book Review (my interest in books obviously exceeds my interest in politics), I found Urrea interviewed about his reading tastes.
Urrea strikes me as a fine writer and a good man with a warm and gentle sense of humor, so I don’t begrudge him this flash flood of attention. (OK, maybe a little.) What I find cloying and a bit suspect is the way you can see the publicity machine stolidly at work. Simon and Gross both work for the same company and the Sunday Review and the Book Review are both sections of the same newspaper. Neither NPR nor the Times had much interest in Urrea until his latest novel appeared – touching on the timely subject of immigration – and now, suddenly, they can’t get enough of him.
Nick Foles not only beat the Patriots, he overcame the Sports Illustrated cover jinx.
Speaking of media, it's nice to see that players, minutes after the game, still hold up actual newspapers proclaiming their victory, and not tablets with the online version.
Two more final nuggets from the Christmas Spectator, which I finished a few days ago. Lynn Barber, in her “Diary,” remembered former editor Alexander Chancellor, who died last year, as not just “a brilliant writer and editor,” but also “one of the last of the great lunchers.” People wrote for him, she said, not for the money but for the lunches. Chancellor was editor in 1980, when I discovered the magazine in the British Institute in Warsaw, Poland, and it was his idea to initiate a High Life column, and run it alongside a Low Life column. Evidently he was an eclectic luncher.
And in his “Miscellaneous Notebook,” Ben Schott informed us that the great comedian Peter Cook had a stock reply to people who told him they were writing a novel. It was: “Neither am I.”
I took the tree down Sunday but I’m still making my way, slowly, through The Spectator Christmas special. Hania bought it at Bob’s about two weeks ago when I was under the weather – “Are you the wife of the guy who’s been looking for this?” she was asked by the cashier – and already on page 128 (I always read the magazine from back to front) I learned that the labradoodle was created in Australia “for a blind woman whose husband was allergic to dog hair.” A little further on I read that Scottish smoked salmon was first produced in London, by Eastern European Jews.
Once into the book reviews, I was going to skip the one of Entitled: A Critical History of the British Aristocracy, but then I would have missed this jewel of a sentence by reviewer Nicky Haslam: “Instead, it’s a polemic against crats aristo, auto, mono or pluto; and the author apparently yearns for any crat of a different stripe – not just demo and bureau, but mobo, neo and probably ochlo to boot.”
In his review of A Short History of Drunkenness (an appropriate tome for the season), James Walton quotes William James: “Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkenness expands, unites, and says yes.” And in his review of An English Christmas, William Cook gives the perfect description of the season: “long periods of pleasant torpor interrupted by brief moments of magic.” Happily, mine is still going on.